Is Conservation Only for the One Percent?

Dear Sundog,

I’m a biologist and land conservationist who has spent the last two decades working with farmers and ranchers to keep their land and way of life intact. I walk their property looking for habitats that might harbor rare plants and threatened wildlife. If the property meets certain ecological criteria, the owner can place the land under “conservation easement,” basically a legal agreement ensuring they will not develop or subdivide the land.

This makes their ranch or farm less valuable on the real estate market; in exchange they get a considerable break on property taxes. I’ve always thought that everyone wins in this relationship: habitat for the more-than-human organisms is legally protected into perpetuity, the community retains the working landscapes that give it character and beauty (“cows not condos”), and families are able to continue ranching and farming, rather than having to sell to developers.

But lately the dynamics have changed. I’m starting to doubt the ethics of conservation—and my own role in making it happen. Nowadays many of the landowners making easements are not multi-generational working families, but extremely wealthy out-of-staters with vacation homes and hobby farms. My work still protects critical habitat for plants and animals, but now I no longer feel like I am preserving a traditional way of life and culture of the west—but bringing about its demise. What should I do? —Conserving Our Ground

Dear COG,

You’ve tapped into such a timely and widespread issue. As the economy appears to be more controlled by a select few than ever, the rest of us face the hard ethical choice between participating—which makes us feel complicit—and opting out, for which the financial sacrifice is significant. For decades your work felt morally right; now it feels like collaborating with the dark side. And what an astonishing turn of events: to sense that the movement to preserve a healthy natural world for all of us has morphed into a cynical ploy by the elite.

Yale professor Justin Farrell astutely studies this phenomenon in Jackson, Wyoming and at the Yellowstone Club in Montana, in his alarming book Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West.

Farrell notes that for the investor class, conserving land isn’t simple philanthropy, it also allows them to increase their wealth. First, they get a hefty tax break by placing easements on the vast tracts of land of their trophy homes; next, the easement prevents the construction of more homes, exacerbating a housing scarcity which inflates their own property value; and lastly, as the pandemic and climate change incited a real estate bonanza in places with solitude and plentiful clean water, investments in land have appreciated even more sharply than most stocks, funds, or bonds.

To add insult to locals, these hedge fund dweebs cosplaying Yellowstone’s John Dutton in Wranglers and Carhartt coats on their private movie sets can now claim—with some truth—to be saviors of the grizzly bear and the peregrine falcon.

But here’s the hard part: the work of conservation easements is supremely important. Study after study shows that land fragmentation is a major threat to biodiversity. Threatened species from bears to wolverines to wolves need large continuous stretches of land, free from roads, houses and people. These animals don’t care if they are roaming through national parks or family ranches. As much as we may dislike massive private landholdings, they are scientifically better for other species than subdivided (affordable) ranchettes.

All political successes lay in the ability to build alliances. The beauty of conservation easements, COG, is that they allow a nature-lover such as yourself into partnership with old-time ranchers who might not give a hoot about the spotted owl, but simply want to keep the family land intact. But as you say, those roles and alliances are shifting. As just one example, look at the case chronicled in the new nonfiction book The Crazies: The Cattlemen, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West by Amy Gamerman, in which a cash-poor Montana rancher who doesn’t believe in climate change sets out to build a wind farm on his property, only to be sued for marring the view by his billionaire neighbors—one of whom made his fortune in fracking in less pristine places, all of whom claim the mantle of protecting the environment.

Here’s another case: for years, green liberals bought Teslas, likely not because they admired company co-founder Elon Musk, but because in an electric vehicle they saw the chance to do good for the planet. Musk played the savior, claiming at one point that he’d done more for the environment than any other human in history.

It turned out to be a deal with the devil. Once EVs made him the world’s richest man, Musk used his treasure to dive into American politics, and has now helped to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, end climate research, and eradicate programs that include the phrase “environmental justice.” He has crippled the agencies that might regulate his own businesses’ ecological practices. The one-time green hero instead joins an environmental rogue’s gallery of fellow easy-to-hate villains: the skipper of the Exxon Valdez, James Watt, and Kelcy Warren, who built the Dakota Access Pipeline over the objections of the Standing Rock Sioux.

The takeaway here is not something simple like “don’t trust the rich.” Rather it’s that saving the planet is most likely to happen in a democracy than any other form of government, and consolidating more wealth among the one percent is bad for democracy. When we see the laudable conservation effort of tycoons like Ted Turner, it’s tempting to cede the movement to the oligarchs; after all they can conserve more land more quickly than the impossibly complex process of government managing its holdings. But if these oligarchs—or their heirs—should like Musk gain enough power to be above the law, their green veneers may quickly erode.

As for your own complicity, COG, I wouldn’t advise quitting your job over it. The work you’re doing is important for saving wildlife, and to put it bluntly, these societal economic changes are not your fault, and reversing them is simply above your pay grade. Wresting power from corrupt and entrenched barons will take—now just as every other time it has been attempted—a national grassroots political movement rising in concert with some elected trustbusting brawler in the mold of a Roosevelt: take your pick between the Republican Teddy or the Democrat Franklin. Keep doing the good work.

Got a question of your own? Send it to sundogsalmanac@hotmail.com

(Photo: Mark Sundeen)